Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great | Page 2

plow!"
That's the way Elbert Hubbard lived and died, and yet he did more--he planned for the future. He planned the future of the Roycroft Shop. Death did not meet him as a stranger. He came as a sometime-expected friend. Father was not unprepared.
The plan that would have sustained us the seven weeks he was in Europe will sustain us seven years--and another seven years.
Elbert Hubbard's work will go on.
I know of no Memorial that would please Elbert Hubbard half so well as to broaden out the Roycroft Idea.
So we will continue to make handmade Furniture, hand-hammered Copper, Modeled Leather. We shall still triumph in the arts of Printing and Bookmaking.
The Roycroft Inn will continue to swing wide its welcoming door, and the kind greeting is always here for you.
"The Fra" will not miss an issue, and you who have enjoyed it in the past will continue to enjoy it!
"The Philistine" belonged to Elbert Hubbard. He wrote it himself for just twenty years and one month. No one else could have done it as he did. No one else can now do it as he did.
So, for very sentimental reasons--which overbalance the strong temptation to continue "The Philistine"--I consider it a duty to pay him the tribute of discontinuing the little Magazine of Protest.
The Roycrofters, Incorporated, is a band of skilled men and women. For years they have accomplished the work that has invited your admiration. You may expect much of them now. The support they have given me, the confidence they have in me, is as a great mass of power and courage pushing me on to success.
This thought I would impress upon you: It will not be the policy of The Roycrofters to imitate or copy. This place from now on is what we make it. The past is past, the future spreads a golden red against the eastern sky.
I have the determination to make a Roycroft Shop--that Elbert Hubbard, leaning out over the balcony, will look down and say, "Good boy, Bert--good boy!"
I have Youth and Strength.
I have Courage.
My Head is up.
Forward--all of us--March!

ELIZABETH B. BROWNING
I have been in the meadows all the day, And gathered there the nosegay that you see; Singing within myself as bird or bee When such do fieldwork on a morn of May. Irreparableness [Illustration: ELIZABETH B. BROWNING]
Writers of biography usually begin their preachments with the rather startling statement, "The subject of this memoir was born"----Here follows a date, the name of the place and a cheerful little Mrs. Gamp anecdote: this as preliminary to "launching forth."
It was the merry Andrew Lang, I believe, who filed a general protest against these machine-made biographies, pleading that it was perfectly safe to assume the man was born; and as for the time and place it mattered little. But the merry man was wrong, for Time and Place are often masters of Fate.
For myself, I rather like the good old-fashioned way of beginning at the beginning. But I will not tell where and when Elizabeth was born, for I do not know. And I am quite sure that her husband did not know. The encyclopedias waver between London and Herefordshire, just according as the writers felt in their hearts that genius should be produced in town or country. One man, with opinions pretty well ossified on this subject, having been challenged for his statement that Mrs. Browning was born at Hope End, rushed into print in a letter to the "Gazette" with the countercheck quarrelsome to the effect, "You might as well expect throstles to build nests on Fleet Street 'buses, as for folks of genius to be born in a big city." As apology for the man's ardor I will explain that he was a believer in the Religion of the East and held that spirits choose their own time and place for materialization.
Mrs. Ritchie, authorized by Mr. Browning, declared Burn Hill, Durham, the place, and March Sixth, Eighteen Hundred Nine, the time. In reply, John H. Ingram brings forth a copy of the Tyne "Mercury," for March Fourteenth, Eighteen Hundred Nine, and points to this:
"In London, the wife of Edward M. Barrett, of a daughter."
Mr. Browning then comes forward with a fact that derricks can not budge, that is, "Newspapers have ever had small regard for truth." Then he adds, "My wife was born March Sixth, Eighteen Hundred Six, at Carlton Hall, Durham, the residence of her father's brother." One might ha' thought that this would be the end on't, but it wasn't, for Mr. Ingram came out with this sharp rejoinder: "Carlton Hall was not in Durham, but in Yorkshire. And I am authoritatively informed that it did not become the residence of S. Moulton Barrett until some time after Eighteen Hundred Ten. Mr. Browning's latest suggestions in this matter can not be